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American Studies

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  9. JProf. Dr. Judith Rauscher

JProf. Dr. Judith Rauscher

Judith Rauscher was a research assistant and lecture at the American Studies section in Bamberg from 2012 to 2020. On November 1, 2020, she was appointed as Assistant Professor of American Studies (Juniorprofessoring für Amerikanische Literatur und Kultur) at the University at Cologne, Germany.

In order to contact Judith Rauscher, please use the following website.

Current Research:

  • "Fictions of a (Non-)Violent State: Gender, Community, and the Technoscientific Imagination in U.S. Speculative Fiction 1870-1920"
  • Critical Environmental Education as a Cultural Studies Project" (Ökologische Bildung als Kulturwissenschaftliche Aufgabe);with Prof. Elizabeth Wheeler (University of Oregon) and Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt (University of Bamberg); initial funding by the Bayerische Forschungsallianz (BayFor)
  • Single-Sex Societies in American Culture
  • Transatlantic Cultures of Decadence

Dissertation: "Poetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry" (Completed in the DFG-funded project "The Environmental Imagination of Mobility: Umwelt und Migration in der Amerikanischen Gegenwartslyrik," directed by Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt, University of Bamberg.)

Research Interests:

  • 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-Century American Poetry
  • Ecocriticism, Science and Technology Studies
  • Speculative Fiction, SF and Fantasy TV and Film
  • State Fictions and Violence in the long 19th Century
  • Representations of Single-Sex Societies in American Culture
  • Theories of Place, Theories of Mobility
  • Gender and Queer Studies, Feminist Criticism

Academic Positions

  • 2018/11 – 2020/10: Research Assistant and Lecturer in American Studies (50%), Institute of English and American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2019/10 – 2020/09: Research Assistant and Program Manager (40%) at the Women's Office of the University of Bamberg
  • 2019/10 – 2020/09: Research Assistant and Lecturer in French Literature (10%), Institute of Romance Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2016/05 – 2018/10: Research Assistant in the DFG-Project "The Environmental Imagination of Mobility: Nature and Migration in Contemporary American Poetry," Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt, American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2013/10 – 2016/04: Research Assistant and Lecturer in American Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2012/04 – 2013/03: Research Assistant and Lecturer in American Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2010/10 – 2012/03: Contract Lecturer for English as a Foreign Language, Language Center of the University of Bamberg

Scholarly Work & Academic Studies

  • 2018/10: Start of Postdoctoral Research in American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2012/10 – 2018/09: PhD Program in American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2012/04: Master's Degree in English and American Studies, University of Bamberg
  • 2010/06: Master's Degree in Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2009/09 – 2010/06: Study of Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2008/09 – 2009/06: Study of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2006/10 – 2008/08: Study of English, French, Spanish Language, Literature & Linguistics, University of Bamberg

Scholarships and Awards

  • 2019/07: Dissertation Award of the Bavarian American Academy
  • 2019/03: DAAD Travel Grant for the 2019 ASLE Conference, UC Davis (USA)
  • 2018/11: Dissertation Award of the University of Bamberg in the field of language and literature; donated by the Rotary Club Bamberg-Schloss Geyerswörth
  • 2018/06: Stipend of the Bavarian American Academy for the summer institute "Futures of American Studies"; Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2015/05 – 2017/03: Participation in the feRNet Mentoring-Program of the University of Bamberg; Mentor Prof. Dr. Colleen Boggs (Dartmouth College)
  • 2013/09 – 2013/10: 2013 Duke University Post-Graduate Research Fellowship of the Bavarian American Academy
  • 2013/07 – 2013/09: 'Step by Step' Scholarship by the Office of Women's Affairs and Equal Opportunity at the University of Bamberg
  • 2013/04 – 2013/06: DAAD Stipend for a 3-month Research visit at Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2009/09 – 2010/06: Fellow, Dartmouth College, Graduate Studies Comparative Literature
  • 2008/09 – 2009/06: Fulbright Scholarship (Travel Grant)
  • 2008/09 – 2009/06: Scholarship of the Federation of German-American Clubs (VDAC)/ Dartmouth College to study at Dartmouth College
  • 2005/06: Award for Academic Excellence and Social Engagement of the Coburger Convent

Study and Research Stays Abroad

  • 2019/06: Participation in the 12th International Walt Whitman Week, New York University, New York (USA)
  • 2016/09 – 2016/10: Research Stay at Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2016/06: Participation in the international BAA summer academy Material Cultures, Florida International University, Miami (USA)
  • 2014/06: Participation in the international BAA summer academy Critical Regionalism in Politics & Culture, Texas State University, San Marcos (USA)
  • 2013/09 – 2013/10: Research Stay at Duke University (USA)
  • 2013/06: Participation in the 6th International Walt Whitman Week, Northwestern University, Chicago (USA)
  • 2013/04 – 2013/06: Research Stay at Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2009/09 – 2010/06: Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2008/09 – 2009/06: Exchange Year and Undergraduate Studies at Dartmouth College (USA)
  • 2005/09 – 2006/08: Work Stay in Tours (France)

Academic Service in Professional Organizations

  • Since 2018/06: Postgraduate Representative in the Advisory Board of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS)
  • Since 2017/11: Speaker of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS)
  • 2017/06 - 2020/10: Coordinator of the Social Media Team of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE)
  • 2015/05 - 2016/11: Member of the Organizing Team of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA)
  • 2011/11 - 2014/11: President of the Alumni Club of the Federation of German-American Clubs (VDAC)

Positions at the University of Bamberg

  • 2019/10 - 2020/10:Representative of Mid-Level Faculty at the Faculty of Humanities
  • 2017/10 - 2019/09: Women's Representative of the Faculty of Humanities (Frauenbeauftragte der Fakulät GuK)
  • 10/2015 - 09/2017: Deputy Women's Representative of the faculty of Humanities (Stellvertretende Frauenbeauftragte der Fakulät GuK)
  • 10/2015 - 09/2017: Voting Member of the council of mid-level academic faculty (Konvent des akademischen Mittelbaus)
  • 10/2015 - 09/2017: Deputy representative for mid-level academic faculty (akademischer Mittelbau) in the standing committee for Teaching and Student Affairs (LuSt) and the committee for the assurance of the Quality of Study Programs and Teaching (AQSL)

Manuscript

  • Poetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry (in preparation)

This study analyses the works of contemporary American poets of migration who combine a concern for different kinds of geographical movement and a concern for concrete physical environments. It focuses on American poetry that deals with human mobility, both voluntary and forced, while also being invested in thinking and working through mobile subjects’ relationships to the natural world as it has been brought into focus by ecocriticism. In five thematic chapters, I focus on poetry published between 1990 and 2017 by Caribbean Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, Lebanese American writer and painter Etel Adnan, Anglo-American poet Juliana Spahr, and Chamorro poet and educator Craig Santos Perez. The relationships of migrants of various ethnic backgrounds to nonhuman environments, the analysis of my primary texts reveals, are complex and fraught with histories of gendered, class-based, racial, colonial, and indeed environmental violence, raising questions about place-based notions of belonging, identity, and community. My study starts with the observation that many poets who write about nature and mobility in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century do not contend themselves with evoking urban spaces or broaching issues of displacement as movement through abstract cultural spaces, as scholarship on literatures of migration tends to emphasize. Instead, their texts engage with very concrete American locales, featuring mobile speakers who are struggling to maintain, regain, or develop meaningful relationships to the natural world. By actively and creatively reimagining such relationships in their poetry, a process I refer to as “poetic place-making,” these texts testify to the potential as well as to the limits of literature when it comes to producing non-parochial environmental imaginaries for our contemporary age of mass mobility as well as global environmental crisis.

Edited Volumes

Articles

  • "Poetry as Feminist Critique" (WT). Handbook of American Poetry. Edited by Sabine Sielke. De Gruyter. [ 2021] De Gruyter
    Handbooks in English and American Studies. (in preparation)
  • "Border-Crossing and Imperiali(ist) Feminism in Star Trek: Discovery." Context is for Kings: An Edited Collection on Star Trek: Discovery. Edited by Sabrina Mittermeier and Mareike Spychala. Liverpool UP, 2020. pp. 243-264.
  • “'She Moves Through Deep Corridors': Mobility and Settler Colonialism in Sharon Doubiago’s Proletarian Eco-Epic Hard Country."  Ecozon@ 11.1 (2020): 115-133.
  • "Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design: An Introduction." Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design. Eds. Franca Bellarsi and Judith Rauscher. Spec. Issue of Ecozon@ 10.1 (2019): 1-23. (with Franca Bellarsi)
  • "From Planar Perspectives to a Planetary Poetics: Aeromobility, Technology and the Environmental Imaginary in Contemporary American Poetry." Environmental Imagination on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture. Eds. Christine Gerhardt and Christa Grewe-Volpp. Spec. Issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016): 445-467.
  • "Toward an Environmental Imagination of Displacement in Contemporary Transnational American Poetry." Geocriticism and Ecocriticism. Ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 189-206.
  • "Canadian Petro-Poetics: Masculinity, Labor, and Environment in Mathew Henderson's The Lease." Energy in Literature: Essays on Energy and Its Social and Environmental Implications in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary Texts. Ed. Paula A. Farca. Oxford: TrueHeart P, 2015. 99-112.
  • "On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali's and Arthur Sze's Poetry of the American Southwest." Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism. Spec. issue of the European Journal of American Studies 9.3 (2014). N. pag.

Review Activities

  • College Literature
  • Atlantic Studies
  • Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power
  • WiN: The EAAS Women's Network Journal

Conference Organization

Conference Presentations (Selection)

  • 2019/06: "Post-Mobility and Queer Ecological Empathy in the Poetry of Etel Adnan," ASLE Conference 2019, UC Davis (USA)
  • 2019/03: "'deutschland im herbst / mir graut vor dem winter‘: Teaching Comparative Cultural Studies Courses on Race in Germany," Conference "Herausforderung ‘Kulturelle Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerbildung’: Perspektiven für das Studium der Geisteswissenschaften,“ University of Bamberg (Germany)
  • 2019/01: "Poetic Place-Making: Natur und Mobilität in deutscher Gegenwartsdichtung." Lunch-Meeting of the Rotary-Club Schloss Geyerswörth, Bamberg (Germany)
  • 2018/11: "'In a Mirror Darkly': Bordercrossing and Imperial Feminism in Star Trek: Discovery." 2018 AAAS Conference "American Im/Mobilities," University of Vienna (Austria)
  • 2018/09: "Groundwork, Fieldwork, Topopoetics: Reading Lorna Goodison's 'The Garden of St. Michael in the Seven-Hilled City of Bamberg.'" EASCLE Conference 2018, Universität Würzburg (Germany)
  • 2018/01: "'Entfernung gilt nichts': Walt Whitmans Dichtung und poetisches Erbe." Lecture Series "Amerika," Studium Generale, VHS Coburg (Germany).
  • 2017/06: "Mobility and/as Recovery in the Materialist Ecofeminist Poetry of Sharon Doubiago," ASLE Conference 2017, Wayne State University, Detroit (USA)
  • 2017/03: “Teaching Intersectional Feminism in Transatlantic Contexts: Developing a Comparative Seminar on Issues of Gender and Race in German and American Feminism.” Second Biennial EAAS Women’s Network Symposium 'Transnational Feminism and/in American Studies,' University of Lausanne (Switzerland)
  • 2016/11: “Conflicted Territorialities and Archipelagic Environments in the Poetry of Craig Santos Perez." Internationale Konferenz 'The Environment and Human Migration: Rethinking the Politics of Poetry,' University of Bamberg (Germany)
  • 06/2016: "Paying the Price for an Impossible Love: Etel Adnan's Defiant Ecopoetics of Hope." Ecopoetics Conference 'Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,' Université de Perpignan, Perpignan (France)
  • 06/2016: "Bodily Perspectives without Lyric Subjects: Materiality and Mobility in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr." BAA Summer Academy 'Material Culture,' Florida International University, Miami (USA)
  • 02/2016: "Of Spaceships and Ocean Planets: The Ethics of Mobility in Joan Slonczewski’s Pragmatic Utopias." Conference 'Maritime Mobilities: Critical Perspectives from the Humanities,' University of Vienna (Austria)
  • 10/2015: "From Identity Politics to a 'Postmodern Poetics of Witness' in American Poetry of Migration," Conference 'Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre,' Augsburg University (Germany)
  • 06/2014: "Dwelling in Diaspora? The Environmental Politics of Displacement in Arthur Sze's The Gingko Light," Annual Conference of the GAAS 2014, Würzburg University (Germany)
  • 03/2014: "Beyond Nature Poetry: Arthur Sze's Intimate Translocal Geographies," ACLA Conference 2014, New York University (USA)
  • 06/2013: "From Ecocriticism to Geocriticism and Back - Place and Displacement in Contemporary Transnational American Poetry," 10th Biennal ASLE Conference 2013, University of Kansas (USA)
  • 04/2013: “Nature as a Reluctant Muse – Place and Displacement in two Poems by Derek Walcott and Agha Shahid Ali,” ACLA Conference 2013, University of Toronto (Canada)
  • 11/2012: (Poster Presentation): "Planetary Perspectives: Technology and the Natural World in Ed Roberson's poem 'Topoi'," Conference 'Risks - Effect & Affect: Technology and Narratives of the 21st century,' University of Bayreuth (Germany)

Seminars (Basic Module)

  • Introduction to American and English Literary Studies
  • Introduction to American and British Cultural Studies

Seminars (Advanced Module)

  • Terrible Laughter: The Grotesque in French & American Literature
  • Motherhood and Fatherhood in African American Culture
  • Race and Gender in German and American Literature and Culture (als Blockseminar an der Universität Bayreuth)
  • Indian Nation: The Native American Struggle for Representation
  • Queer/Denker_innen: LGBTQ Issues in German and American Literature and Culture
  • One-Gender Worlds. Gender and Sexuality in American Science Fiction
  • 20th Century American Poetry and the City
  • American Modernism in Paris (mit Exkursion nach Paris)

Seminars (Specialization Modules)

  • Toward “a more perfect Union”: Violence and the Utopian Imagination in U.S. American Culture
  • Green Popular Culture and American Film (mit Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt)
  • "Surveiller et Punir: Race and Biopolitics in French and American Culture" (mit Prof. Dr. Dina De Rentiis)
  • The Challenges of Intersectionality: Race and Gender in German and American Literature and Culture (mit Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt)
  • The Politics of American Poetry (mit Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt)
  • Theories of Nature, Theories of Mobility: New Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies (mit Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt)

Exercise (Supplemental Module)

  • Key Texts in Literary Studies

Language Classes

  • English Language Practice for Erasmus Students (Advanced, B1-B2)
  • English Language Practice for Erasmus Students (Intermediate, A2-B1)